Have something to say?

Ready to be published? LXer is read by around 350,000 individuals each month, and is an excellent place for you to publish your ideas, thoughts, reviews, complaints, etc. Do you have something to say to the Linux community?

Many people still question whether Linux will ever make it fully into mainstream computer acceptance. A $199 computer now available on a major superstore's shelves just in time for Christmas might change all that. Anyone who wants a computer to just to send email and instant messages and watch YouTube videos should like the Everex gPC, which is powered by a nifty Linux distribution called gOS.

Let’s lighten things up with a gadget post. You may have seen that Everex launched a $200 computer that runs Linux. It looks like Wal-Mart sold out of them, but not to worry: more are on the way. Why should you be interested? Well, instead of Windows, it comes installed with gOS, which is a version of Ubuntu that is customized to work well with web-based tools from Google, Flickr Facebook, and Skype. When I heard that, I had to order one of these PCs to check it out for myself.

Red Hat plans to begin a private beta test of new open-source messaging software next month, hoping to shake up a section of the server market currently dominated by proprietary rivals and give the Linux seller a new revenue source. Server messaging software's purpose is--bear with me here for a moment--sending messages. That may sound obvious, but doing it reliably and in high volume is essential to large-scale networked business tasks such as trading stocks, where a brokerage that can place buy and sell orders faster than a rival can make real money.

We are excited to make the final preliminary announcement of Freedomware Gamefest 2007, a first international online event featuring a multitude of tournaments as part of a single happening and with games that are only Free Software.

Desktop customization in Linux is very flexible; from the ultra-modern KDE and GNOME window managers to with the likes of Fluxbox and AfterStep, there's a Linux desktop to suit everyone. Jack Wallen covers some of your Linux desktop options.

We are pleased to announce the 10th Anniversary Linux Symposium will be held from July 23 ~ 26, 2008 in Ottawa, Canada. The Symposium will also feature multiple keynote presentations, in depth tutorials, birds of a feather sessions, papers on the most current topics in Linux and Open Source, mini summits open to related Linux and Open Source projects to be held in the day(s) before the Symposium and speakers from outside the industry who will share their experiences with Linux and Open Source and its impact.

This tutorial shows how you can enable Compiz Fusion on an Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) desktop (the system must have a 3D-capable graphics card - I am using an ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 here). With Compiz Fusion you can use beautiful 3D effects like wobbly windows or a desktop cube on your desktop.

Supporters of the open access movement (OA), the open-source-inspired community that promotes free access to academic research, are disappointed but not discouraged by the defeat of a bill that would have required research published by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States to be available to the public. Instead, they see the bill as an important step in raising awareness about OA among American legislators and the general public. Nor do they rule out the eventual passage of the OA provisions.

Mozilla ruffled some penguin feathers last month when the organization revealed that Firefox 3 would get an extensive visual refresh to maximize integration with Windows and Mac OS X, but not Linux. After the decision was widely criticized by Linux enthusiasts, Mozilla reversed its position and decided to revisit Linux theming. Work on the new Linux theme has progressed rapidly in the past month, and the earliest pieces are now included in the latest Firefox 3 nightly build. We took a good long look at the new theme—called Gnomestripe—and we like what we see.

There are three well-known open source clients for managing PostgreSQL databases: psql, pgAdmin, and phpPgAdmin. If you use Postgres in a collaborative team, however, you should get to know phpPgAdmin, which is expressly designed for such environments. It lets users and administrators create user accounts, databases, tables, sequences, functions, and triggers. PhpPgAdmin is a Web-based application written in PHP that can manage one or more PostgreSQL databases. It is 100% compatible with PostgreSQL. It performs all the standard Data Definition Language (DDL) and Data Manipulation Language (DML) statements. It can back up and restore an entire cluster, and can manage a Slony replication cluster, all in an easy-to-understand interface.

Do you ever get tired of listening to gamers who insist that all the best games are for consoles or Windows, so why bother with GNU/Linux? Do you have colleagues who maintain that GNU/Linux is suitable only for serious work, and that games are frivolous and unimportant? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people go on about how expensive games are to produce, and how they just couldn’t possibly work under a GNU license. My two favorite genres of computer game are graphical adventure games (GAGs) and computer role-playing games (CRPGs). For this article, I’ve chosen to focus on free software CRPGs currently available for GNU/Linux.

Linux has already permanently changed the enterprise desktop landscape, and is set to grow further, according to a new report from Forrester Research. The report, How Windows Vista Will Shake Up The State Of The Enterprise Operating System, published this week, predicted that the days of ever more strict standardisation on the Windows platform are effectively over. Linux will only become a stronger force in the enterprise, according to Forrester analyst Benjamin Gray.

Sun Microsystems will release its xVM Ops Center virtualisation management application under the General Public Licence version 3 (GPLv3), the company revealed at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. The project marks the first application that Sun has put under the GPLv3. Rich Green, executive vice president for software at Sun, told vnunet.com that the licence was a "first step", suggesting that the company could pick GPLv3 for other projects in the future.

Last week I wrote about transparency as an open source value. Today, in the second of this informal series, I want to discuss the value called consensus. Consensus is an essential open source value, and a value which distinguishes open source from the proprietary models which came before it. Every successful open source project I know operates through consensus. Orders aren’t given, instructions are worked out. Raised voices, fists hammered on tables, these lead to code forks, and to volunteers abandoning a project. Successful open source entrepreneurs do their work through consensus. They listen to the people under them, and they seek shared responsibility. The best will say “we” did what works but “I” take the blame for what goes wrong.

In the 2007 Desktop Linux Survey, VirtualBox ranked number 3, after Wine and VMware. As for me, I used VirtualBox OSE almost exclusively when taking screenshots for my reviews. It's fast and easy to use! In this mini how-to, I will also show you some interesting screenshots.

The Krita donation drive has succeeded beyond the expectations of the Krita developers. Donations from all over the world made it possible to buy two Intuos graphics tablets and two art pens for the Krita developers to test their software with. The Krita developers are very grateful to the community for making this possible. The Intuos tablets and art pens make it possible to develop brushes and tools that make use of advanced features such as tilt and rotation for Krita 2.0.